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| More than 8 billion persons on the planet, but here are places seemingly free of humans. |
This screenshot of photo landscapes in the photo sharing user group called LANDCAPE, https://flickr.com/groups/landcape/pool/ shows a wide variety of locations, lighting, and composition elements. What is in common for nearly all of the uploaded contributions to this international group, apart from the outdoor subject matter, is the effort made to exclude people from the scene. Of course, despite the absence of human figures, there frequently is indirect evidence of people shaping the land, leaving paths or roads, leaving ruins, and so on.
Clearly, the object of delight in the photo sharing group is the land itself, together with the light and shadow that falls upon it. But pausing to consider the dominance and prominence of humans on all other life forms in the air, land, and sea, these pictures do seem strange: how can such a great number of people covering the planet NOT be found in the photographs? The answer is that the photographer has chosen a season and time to release the shutter when people are outside the frame of the composition. In other cases, the difficulty in reaching the viewing point means few people venture there. In other words, despite the high human population around the planet, it is not evenly distributed: some places are densely lived in, but other places are not. In other words, yes, the planet Earth is heavy with humans and their activities that threaten other animals, plants, and microbes by destroying habitats or directly destroying those non-human lives. But the photographers in this sharing website are recording places - or at least brief moments there - where people are not visible.
